On Writing Canon

It will come as no surprise to people who know me that I take canon very seriously. I have choked back, “What the fuck!? That didn’t happen!” to myself at more movies than I can count. Continuity issues drive me crazy too. I mean, the little nit picky things are fine (Vivienne from Pretty Woman is eating a croissant! Vivienne is eating a pancake! OH NO!), funny, whatever, but the bigger things?

Oh. And Han totally shot first.

I’ve been reading the Outlander series. There’s one thing that bothered me. Aside from the itty bitty gutter. I had to crack the spine just to read the book. Yeah, I like trees too and think we should save paper, but c’mon be reasonable! Let me read the damn book!! Anyway. Oh, HERE BE OUTLANDER SPOILERS, btw. I’ll stick these under the cut just in case.

Outlander! And my bitchin’ new mani!

So, Geillis Duncan. She’s pregnant with Dougal MacKenzie’s child and Colum will “take care of it” … by lighting her on fire. But, then in Dragonfly in Amber Dougal is torturing himself with the description of Geilie’s death. But then later in Voyager, I think, we learn that Dougal had saved her from the fire. Like, sure, we need to have Roger’s origin story and a spooky witchy villain, but… And I know you can’t anticipate everything and one that you will need, especially when you are five thousand pages into a story, but….

And it is under this need for things to be just so that I have been writing. I know LuLo is not nearly the scope of Outlander, but still. I worry about it so much! All the little errors I find go on the list of “Shit to Do.” I only recently tried to abbreviate that and realized it was STD. 🙂

The problem and blessing of having so much “stuff” is that you can use it later, but you have to keep track of it. Little details added for kicks become hugely important later in ways that I never could have imagined.

Some of this may be because I’m a pantser. “Imma gonna tell a mufuckin’ story and I don’t care where it goes!!” Writing romance takes care of some of that for me. I follow the basic romance structure. Which, is freeing in its own way. More on that in a later post. But, those little details take on lives of their own. It’s like an inadvertent Chekhov’s gun. More often than not, I have what I need to build my story and world from the outset. I don’t usually need to go back and add things. I do, of course, but I can usually pull from earlier in the story and voila! It’s there.

I’m writing another book in the LuLo series for this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo and was thinking about stuff I cut from earlier drafts. Laszlo was being a raging cockweasel. It wasn’t in his personality and it didn’t fit the story, so it got cut. But I wonder.

The continuity is important to me and I really write for myself. I don’t anticipate a huge following, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ crazier shit has happened. I don’t need a bunch of me’s poring through my writing and finding errors. I know there are going to be, but, I don’t need that. HA. Maybe you don’t want a law, disease or Buzzfeed article named after you. 🙂 Or a Twittercampaign, either.

All I can say is, God help the filmmakers if my shit ever gets turned into a movie. 🙂